The disappearance of the world

In this photographic work, I try to express visually a feeling that has accompanied me since the first day of the year 2019 – when a new government took office in Brazil: the feeling that the world is disappearing.

I believe that this feeling is caused by the way the new government is rewriting the past and trying to change abruptly our cultural identity. Brazil is becoming unintelligible and unrecognizable. We quickly changed from a country that, with all its problems, had joy as its fundamental emotion, to a country that brings at its core hatred and violence.

The most dangerous problem is that, nowadays, in Brazil, knowledge, study, and arts are viewed with suspicion as evidence of a "terrible ideology," that seeks to destroy the values upheld by “traditional families”, giving the youth a freedom of thought that – they believe – should be denied. Death threats at universities are becoming frequent. One example of this current situation is how the Brazilian government wants to defund philosophy and sociology in public universities.

But this photographic work is not about all those problems. It is just an attempt to give form and to name a feeling: the disappearance of the world.

This work is dedicated to Professor Paulo Faria (UFRGS). The idea of a diachronic incommensurability present in his book Time, Thought, and Vulnerability was the backdrop of the philosophical reflections that motivated this work.